by Jon Katz
Still, she agreed that it had grown too difficult to care properly for nine or ten dogs, too hard to maintain balance. Over the next months, she intended to relinquish a couple of others. Life in a new place with five Newfoundlands would be plenty interesting enough. When she told her shocked comrade in dog rescue that some of the dogs needed to go back, her friend chided her for letting the dogs down.
“Sorry,” Jane said. “I love the dogs, but I come first.”
I thought it was one of the healthiest things she’d ever said, and I was overjoyed to hear it and to have played any role in her decision. It spoke to the power of dog love, of the need to find perspective and fit it into our lives without drowning in it.
SOME PEOPLE ACQUIRE DOGS FOR THE SIMPLEST, MOST UTILITARIAN reasons—to hunt birds, to guard warehouses. But people who see their dogs as integral, vital parts of their families often feel that way for reasons buried deep within their own histories. People who’ve been hurt, who know suffering and helplessness, who’ve felt powerless in their own lives, are drawn to these dependent animals, who they believe love them unconditionally. Caring for dogs, feeding them, healing their wounds, is somehow healing for people, too.
Dog love is powerful stuff. Dogs are voiceless, so we are free to project any sort of thought and emotion on them. They are helpless, so they touch our innate and visceral need to nurture—which can arise because we were nurtured and know how to do it, or because we weren’t and are drawn to the chance to rewrite our pasts. We think we can make the world a perfect place for at least one creature.
Beyond that, we perceive dogs as being unwaveringly loyal and devoted. We rarely perceive other people as that dependable, so we are grateful. Dogs give back, provide attention, affection, and comfort.
But sometimes, people can come through for you, too. It was miraculous for me to finally be able to help my sister, even a little. I would come see her, I promised, when she moved into her new place on the lake.
Chapter Seven
THE GOOD DOG
ROSE WAS STILL TOO YOUNG TO WORK SHEEP REGULARLY—THE conventional wisdom said she was a year or two away from serious herding—and Orson too excitable. So in the days after the livestock arrived I usually took Homer, my most experienced herding dog, into the pasture. He needed more training, but I expected him to help me get by until I sorted things out.
It was odd having my own sheep; as with my dogs, I felt ferociously protective of them. I was vigilant about their welfare, tossing out more feed and hay than they really needed, scanning the horizon for enemies, checking the fences daily. I evaluated everything around me—bugs, animals, weather—as either good for the flock or not. I had belled two of the ewes, so if the flock started running for any reason, day or night, I’d hear the noise and check things out. At Carolyn’s, she and her horde of herding dogs were always around to provide backup. Here we were on our own.
Homer, who’d spent the most time around sheep, seemed my best shot as a helper. I planned to train Rose to herd by myself, a long and complex process that would require more research, patience, and experimentation than I could usually muster for a task. I respected trainers, and had gotten much help from several, but I wanted to see what I’d learned. Come spring, Rose would either be learning to herd sheep, or not.
My own frustration and anger were my worst enemies. To a great extent, Homer had already paid the price. He had his own problems and issues, but my barked commands and short temper had made him anxious and confused. When a border collie gets anxious around sheep, bad things happen.
Rose, I had sworn, would have a different history. If she could learn to herd well, I would know I’d made progress. If I could make it fun for her, if I could encourage her gifts, she’d do fine and would teach me much more than I could teach her.
But that could take years, and meanwhile Bedlam Farm was up and running—a shocking reality, considering the very idea was just a few months old.
I had limited needs for herding, initially. Mostly, I had to move the sheep from one paddock to another, and to keep them at bay while I put down corn and feed. But with a testy ram and two donkeys roaming around—and all these creatures always hungry—things could quickly get chaotic and, if you weren’t paying attention, dangerous. The peaceable ewes turned avaricious when a bucket of corn appeared, and their table manners were not refined. They could stampede. In fact, if they could knock you over and grab the bucket from your hands, they would.
A dog was also necessary to drive the sheep out of the corners of the barn or the training pen for vet visits and other maintenance—hoof-trimming, worming, shearing.
People who watch the process on cable don’t realize how predatory the relationship really is between dogs and sheep. To a young border collie, sheep are lunch, writ large. The dogs therefore do a lot of racing around and lunging early on, whereas a border collie who knows his stuff will glide easily around the sheep and turn them quickly.
That’s why developing a calm, practiced herding instinct and the ability to work with a herder takes so much patience, endless repetition. The dogs are so intense, with such drive and energy, it often seems they’ll never slow down enough to listen. That had been my problem with Homer. From the first, though, Rose had watched me like a hawk and moved gracefully and professionally around the sheep. The contrast was confusing. Had I screwed Homer up? Or was he just a different dog? Perhaps some of each.
Still, I thought Homer could handle most of our rudimentary farm tasks, especially if I continued our training. He had a pretty good recall (meaning, he usually came when called) but he got excited quickly. And because he was square and low to the ground, he couldn’t move as quickly as some border collies could. So he sometimes compensated by running and gripping, using his mouth to move the sheep, rather than his eye or body movement.
I was determined to do better by Homer here. With sheep out the back door, we could learn and improve together. We’d begun going out for short runs around the training pen.
But then came that crisp day when Homer drove a ewe into a fencepost, necessitating emergency surgery in a freezing drizzle.
Experienced border collies are always aware of where the herder is, eager to keep the sheep between themselves and the shepherd. At its best, herding is a beautiful, synchronistic ballet. A herder should be able to walk with his sheep for miles without even turning around, knowing that they’re right behind him, with the dog trotting right behind them.
But Homer had been so aroused that day, he seemed to have forgotten I was there at all. Wild-eyed, he’d been moving too quickly, more like a missile than a sheepdog making a curved outrun, ignoring my commands, grabbing the errant ewe by her left knee until, in a panic, she shook him off—only to run straight into the post.
I was startled and horrified, screaming at Homer, who was far too aroused to hear me.
This wasn’t how I’d wanted to treat any of my animals, not how I’d wanted to begin life at the farm. Homer was here to move and protect the sheep, not to attack them. How could a border collie not know that? As his ears went flat back and he backed away, abashed, the answer was as simple as it was unpleasant: he had not been trained properly.
It was an unhappy reminder of my continuing conflicts with Homer: we had been herding together for two years, and despite all our lovely afternoons grazing Carolyn’s flock, I still couldn’t get him to come, lie down, or stay when I needed him to. I understood all too well that this said much more about me than him, but still, it said a lot. I was frustrated and disappointed, in myself and in him, in what we still hadn’t been able to accomplish together.
WHEN TRAINERS GATHER AT TRIALS AND SHOWS TO JOKE AND banter among themselves—they have volumes of “you-won’t-believe-this” tales—among the stories they most love to share are the tales of the “good dog,” the sweet one, the dog introduced invariably as the model citizen.
The good dog is usually presented in sharp contrast to a troublemaker peer. Unlike the problem dog—iron
ically, often the most loved, to whom his or her owners are most attached—the good dog does what’s expected. He or she is obedient, appropriate with people and other dogs, causes no trouble.
Invariably, this is the dog the trainers keep a cautious eyes on.
“Whenever I hear somebody tell me about their ‘good’ dog, I think, ‘Uh-oh,’” a trainer friend told me. The problems of the bad dog are obvious, much described. The good dog flies under the radar. Since he demands no attention, he usually gets little. He either has troubles nobody notices, or he causes troubles other dogs get blamed for. “The ‘good dog’ is the one nobody’s paying attention to, that people have forgotten about,” my friend said. “But more often than not, sooner or later there’s a problem.”
I’d come to understand that. On the farm, I was playing out the drama of the good dog.
Homer was my good dog, and everyone else’s, too. He’s one of those dogs—unlike Orson—who fits most people’s image of what a great pet should be. He doesn’t chew things he isn’t supposed to chew or mount strange canine females. He isn’t overly needy or intrusive, doesn’t jump or slobber.
In other words, he does few of the things that most dogs naturally love to do. Submissive, wary, and good-natured, he was sent to me in the first place because his breeder believed him to be one of the few dogs who could live peaceably with his temptestuous housemate. This turned out to be true, but it cost Homer a lot.
Studies of submissive dogs show that they often adapt by becoming background pets, living on the periphery, staying out of the way, waiting to edge toward the food bowl, or daring to chew their biscuits. They do what they need to do to stay out of trouble. This is what Homer had learned, what I had allowed to happen.
Trainers and behaviorists know, of course, that the good dog (like the bad dog) is a myth. Dogs are neither good nor bad; they are shaped by all sorts of factors: their mother’s feeding and nurturing habits, life in the litter with their siblings, their first few months in the world, their owner’s instructional methods.
They adapt to their environments depending on training and circumstances and on varying degrees of luck, instinct, and skill on the part of human beings. “Good” and “bad” are human constructs with relatively little meaning to dogs. As people come to see animals as part of their families, however, it follows that they begin measuring them in human terms of being obedient, well behaved. I didn’t want to do this to Homer. This wasn’t a case of his being good or bad, but of how well I’d taught him to live in our world, or hadn’t.
Like the shy, awkward kid growing up in the shadow of a more charismatic older sibling, Homer lived entirely in Orson’s shadow. Orson was the hero of my first dog book. Orson was the one about whom a movie would be made.
You couldn’t help loving Homer, of course. A profoundly amiable creature, he would collapse with joy at the sight of the mailman, his favorite UPS driver, and every other kid getting off a school bus. Each morning, he braved Orson’s possessive wrath to hop onto our bed and wrap himself around Paula’s head for a snuggle. He and Paula were crazy about each other, seeing in each other the stability, predictability, and sanity so often missing around them. Unlike Orson, a pest in his affections who never knew when to quit, Homer was gentle and discreet, crawling up to offer a few licks, then skittering away.
While I did love Homer dearly, I’d known for a while that in some ways our relationship was incomplete, troubled. Although it is heresy to say so, we don’t love all our dogs the same way, any more than we love all people equally. Nor do dogs love us in the uniform, unwavering way often depicted in dog lore. When I first picked Homer up at the Albany airport, he cringed and backed away from me. We’d gotten much closer, but I’d never completely shaken a sense that he didn’t really know what to make of me. It’s a feeling I’ve experienced many times, though usually with humans.
Perhaps because we know that we are supposed to, we pretend, even to ourselves, that we do love all our dogs the same. In such cases, dogs’ lives grow even more complicated, since the problems—like the elephant in the living room—are rarely acknowledged and thus rarely addressed.
I should have paid more attention to certain idiosyncracies. Homer was the first dog I ever had, for instance, who rarely stayed in the same room with me. When I was working in my basement study, Orson was always Velcroed to my leg. Rose, more independent and less needy, came and went, but continually touched base and checked up on me. Homer usually went upstairs to doze until the next walk or meal. When I sat on the family-room sofa, I often had to elbow Rose or Orson aside. But Homer almost never hopped up alongside me.
Some of this, I knew, was the result of our chaotic years with Orson, who for a while had glared and glowered whenever Homer came near me. Orson was a powerful, dominant, and possessive creature, Homer a docile, submissive, and cautious one. Some of it, I was repeatedly told by trainers, was the result of my inadequate or haphazard training.
But some of it, I also believed, belonged to that peculiar realm of chemistry. At the core, I was no longer sure I was really the best owner for Homer; I also wondered if he was the right dog for me. My other dogs and I seemed almost eerily in tune. Things didn’t always go smoothly, but there were few places I wanted to go that didn’t involve Orson and Rose, and vice versa.
How ironic, given that Homer had generally behaved impeccably. Orson raided the refrigerator, opened screen doors, jumped through windows. He roared off after long-haired shaggy dogs he thought were sheep. He herded bicyclists and skateboarders and scarfed food from babies’ strollers. He escaped over, under, and through fences. I love him beyond words. Homer did none of those things, yet our relationship seemed a struggle.
Increasingly, Homer lagged behind on walks, left a room if Orson and I were in it, and showed poor name recognition and eye contact, despite hundreds of dollars spent on beef and liver treats. He did not seem—something that only someone who knows and loves a dog well can see—a happy dog.
Since Homer so rarely misbehaved, there hadn’t been reason to pay close attention to him, so I hadn’t. For a long time, I didn’t focus on the fact that Homer couldn’t really distinguish between my yelling at Orson and my yelling at him. Bit by bit, he’d detached himself from this raucous process, which he correctly judged had little to do with him. He grew up a dog apart, without a leading role in the main drama. Orson went berserk if left alone in our early years, and he never permitted Homer to play with me. At the sight of a ball or tug toy, he would give Homer the border collie eye and Homer would retreat to the corner of the yard.
Could I have trained our way out of this? Sure, especially knowing what I now know. But I didn’t then. Orson took too much time; or perhaps I wasn’t motivated enough.
HERDING WAS THE THING HE MOST LOVED, AND THERE WAS NO more companionable grazing dog. Homer quivered with excitement whenever we pulled into Raspberry Ridge. When I said, “Let’s go get the sheep,” Homer exploded with glee and rushed to the barnyard fence. We’d walk Carolyn’s two hundred sheep down a forested path to the pasture—they knew the way so well a stuffed dog could have moved them—where Homer and I would sit for hours listening to the herd’s munching. We’d take the flock out late at night, in the predawn hours, in the heat of the day.
Sitting with Homer and the sheep, I came to understand why there were domesticated dogs in the first place, why we’d invited them into our caves and tents millennia ago. Homer had little instinct for actual herding—he was always prone more to chasing—but he did take to keeping watch. He would never quit on a job, digging sheep out of the woods for hours, inefficiently but energetically, then panting in the hot sun while they grazed.
At times, his instincts were nothing less than heroic. One spring evening a ewe broke off from the herd and ran into the woods—strange behavior. Homer followed her, and when I located them, a newborn lamb was nuzzling the startled Homer and the ewe had taken off to rejoin the flock. It took the better part of an hour to identify the prop
er ewe and bring her and her baby back into the barn for nursing and warmth.
Meanwhile, the lamb had imprinted on Homer and tailed him for weeks. Homer looked unnerved, but kept an eye on the little guy.
We’d shared another sheep adventure the previous winter. Carolyn was sick, so I was staying at Raspberry Ridge with the dogs to help out. A blizzard blew in one night, earlier than predicted, trapping the sheep far out in the pasture. Suddenly faced with bitter temperatures, howling winds, and thigh-high snowdrifts, I feared for the vulnerable lambs who might be born in such harsh conditions, but when I ventured out to check on the flock, shrieking winds drove the freezing ice and snow into my eyes and the dogs’. Orson tried to plow through the snowdrifts, but he soon began limping, as balls of ice formed on his legs, feet, and belly, weighing him down and making it hard to walk. I had to bring him back inside.
It was up to me and Homer, who went to work with a purpose and focus that could never come from training, only from instinct. He knew where the sheep were and made a beeline for them. I had to stop every few minutes to scrape the ice off his coat and free his eyes, which were nearly frosted shut with ice and snow. He ploughed over and under drifts, often disappearing from sight, only to pop up fifty yards ahead of me. Even in a furious storm, I could see his tongue hanging out; he gobbled snow to keep from dehydrating. I worried this was too much for a sweet little dog.
But we were out all night, Homer and I, and he located every ewe and every lamb, and helped me dig them free. He barked and nipped until the half-frozen animals started walking toward the barn. Two lambs had already died, frozen to the ground, by the time we found them. But we finally marched all the others back to the barn, put the ewes and lambs in their heated stalls, working for hours to make sure that all the right moms and lambs were together. I thought more than once what his effort would have meant to a farmer a century ago.